Mr. Solomon’s wisdom

Attending the Upper Midwest Employment Law Institute in St. Paul this past May, I was only seeking to fulfill my continuing legal education requirement. I wasn’t looking for politics, but at the institute’s plenary morning session I found myself listening to NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon. Solomon is a newsmaker worthy of general attention, a perfect representative of the lawlessness at the heart of the Obama administration.

Representing an agency that is in legal limbo as a result of Obama’s putatively unconstitutional appointments to it, Solomon is carrying a heavy load. In his remarks before the employment law institute in May, Solomon conveyed a mournful angst and subliminal anger about the situation in which the board finds itself. I failed to capture that spirit in the photograph Solomon let me snap before his remarks at the breakout session.

In her weekly Wall Street Journal column Kim Strassel now finds Solomon to be “The lord of U.S. labor policy.” Strassel explores the deepening legal limbo of the board and the shenanigans of its combative acting general counsel. Solomon is flailing manfully in a bad cause:

Right now, the NLRB is the only weapon the administration can wield on behalf of Big Labor. The need to placate that most powerful special interest was behind Mr. Obama’s decision to install his illegal recess appointments in the first place, and it explains the NLRB’s continuing defiance of courts and Congress. Mr. Solomon’s wisdom is the Obama philosophy of raw power, in all its twisted glory.